PDCWolf

Except what's underneath is what most people cared for, or didn't you hear the constant questioning for the "reworked core systems" or "the new codebase"? People didn't expect a comical repeat of picking an amateur engine and filling it again with technical debt, being badly stretched and with a new coat of paint. So far, KSP2 has failed to evolve on any aspect, other than the atmospheric graphics. Except a lot of the stuff in your modern average shooter can be traced back to HL2, and those that go back further, to HL1. If your everyday shooter nowadays including physics and environments ready for you to exploit them is not enough of a clue, then you really have no clue what genre defining means.

I mean, if you wanna discount actual genre defining things like gameplay modernizations, the engine being the literal most popular piece of software (along with the prequel) for decades, to the point of still being relevant, the episodic structure, drivable vehicles (not the first game but still an evolution over the prequel), the AI being one of the most detailed, the size of the maps, the inclusion of physics puzzles, the grav gun and its need for a highly interactable world, and probably a lot of stuff I might be forgetting. You're free to not like it. That it was genre defining, and thus a lot of its new tech we even take for granted on shooters nowadays, is not even up for discussion.

Half-Life 2 was amazing for the time, it also was one of the most expected games of its era whilst still being retro-compatible enough thanks to its wide array of settings. It got a 96 on metacritic and an almost ubiquitous 100/100 from multiple publications. It was another momentous genre-defining game like the original. Half-Life being a super linear shooter meant the sequel was well received as just that again and a continuation of the story. In fact, I did say this before: Singleplayer shooters can get away with little to no evolution as what you want from them is a continuation to the story and to shoot some new stuff. The only thing that went wrong with HL2 was the multiplayer component, but that's because the prequel's was such a globally acclaimed giant that it's still alive to this day (and I'm confident there's at least an order of magnitude more players from third world countries that are not on Steam for reasons). As for Prince of Persia, I only ever played the DOS/Sega original, and a demo for Prince of Persia 2 on DOS, so can't talk about the trilogy.

You do you, and all power to you, but that's not what EA is normally perceived to be for: you don't pay $50 to watch, you pay $50 (or whatever) to be part. In fact, this launch should've probably cleared it up pretty well that people don't pay specifically to be alpha testers and being held in the dark for months, they pay to influence the game and provide feedback on features, not on obvious bugs that anyone playing for 5 minutes would've noticed. As for watching the development, neither the forum, discord, or anywhere are paywalled, you don't need to pay to watch. Also, price sets expectations. Ask anyone on the street if they'd expect this mess for $50. Heck, you don't need to ask, reviews are right there. They showed a "complete" game (bar the obvious performance problems) for the best part of 2019 to 2022. Only in October did they announce it'd be early access with stuff missing, and even then they were still talking about how performant and polished it was gonna be. From experience, the people are really not at fault here unless you take straight up not believing anything they say or show as the norm. Sadly I can't express what I believe the marketing campaign was without risking another ban. 0.1.5 is really pretty solid, most people playing it are happy and would gladly tell you the game works, which is a huge achievement. Yet that achievement has only pulled 200 concurrent players and dropping. The game is playable, and works wonders compared to release, and even compared to the previous patch, so you'll realize bugs aren't the problem. They were at some point, sure, but most glaringly foundational stuff can be considered fixed and the people are not coming back. Why? Exactly what I said before. The game is stuck on a bad foundation, it's also known by now that there's a lot of easily disagreeable design decisions, there's also features confirmed not coming (robotics, life support), and of course, discounting all of that, the game is still lacking a lot of stuff you can find on the first. That is why people aren't coming back. You could make the current game bug-perfect and they still wouldn't come back.

It does so long as it doesn't get better. People won't magically forget when release arrives, they have to rebuild that during however long they plan to take. It's incredible how decontextualized people have become in regards to the game's situation: The people that want the game no matter what already have it. They won't "come back" because they're already there. The people who felt hugely betrayed or disappointed are gone, they won't come back. Welcome to the 75% activity decrease slump. The people who don't trust the devs might still stick around to see where they end up. There's probably a chance to convince them if FS! and following headliners are actually worth it. That KSP2 will have the same engine, spaghetti codebase, unoptimized physics and comical joints is already set in stone, and so the people who wanted the foundational pieces changed are gone, and won't come back. The people that don't mind the point above but wanted more will only come back on further headliners, provided those are good, or even in post 1.0 DLCs (remember how KSP2 will not have robotics or life support?) So far 0.1.5 and FS! announcement haven't done anything for the reviews or the playerbase being back again on a negative trend after the small patch spike. I don't care about mods, I care about whatever they want people to pay $50 for. At least we'll be getting the first taste of "the game" with FS! which'll probably be a big reality check by the looks of it.

Hey, if we wanna talk market share, whatever they're doing now has like 20% of the market of the previous game.

If the whole lego building and physics simulation is only there to account for a very limited, well demarcated "user stories", might as well build a linear VR animation like Apollo.

You could chose to not fight and open enterprises and trade, which'll get you to retire richer than fighting. You can choose to not ally with any lord, or take on the cause of the exiled lords. There's also the fact that what happens on your map, and thus the story of your character, will be completely different, as that's pretty much emergent narrative. That's the thing with open ended, emergent narrative games. KSP2 is open ended, but has almost no narrative elements save for whatever story will come out of the easter eggs or discoverables, which even if told non-linearly, will start and end up in exactly the same place on your first or hundredth play-through. How to fix that? I'm sure there's hundreds of ways that me and others could've thought of, and not a single one of them realizable because we're getting another puddle depth lego game. They could've turned the contract system into something remarkable by transforming it with allegiance/sponsorship mechanics with different companies, governments, competing space programs/nations and so on. Colonies could be an interesting point as well if included in that same system. Kerbals could actually be unique individuals rather than having different hair and skin colors and randomized stats. Heck, just think of similar games like Stormworks or From The Depths, just having a purpose for vehicles other than get X to Y place, drives players to extremely different playstyles, where you'll find some people never ever develop a water tanker helo/plane for forest fires, others just do trains, and so on. In KSP2 the only way for those to be born is self imposed restrictions, or role-play, because not even contracts are there to challenge you anymore. This is why I have so little faith in "exploration mode". In fact, to continue the rant, here's another piece of mind: for my stint as a gaming journalist, one of my personal jobs was to review the Sims and its expansions. EA would provide us an account with access to all DLCs forthe Sims 4 every time they added a new one. Do you know why the Sims 4 is such unfunny, soulless garbage? Exactly for the same I'm describing. Every DLC is its little uninspired, disjointed, bottled in experience. Back in Sims 1, 2, and even parts of 3, Sims would act on their own most of the time, and every non-asset DLC would add stuff to the world. This meant every sim could partake in the new features. You'd have your neighbors be turned into vampires by a random visitor, people marrying and having children, cheating, doing good or bad at their work, and so on. Conversely, Sims 4 is a dollhouse where nothing happens unless you directly intervene for it to happen. You can start your save, play for 7 generations of Sims, go out of your house and realize the world is exactly the same as when you started. Added DLC? That's something only you can partake in, and will only meet the sims pre-generated for the DLC plus maybe one or two visitors from the homeless sim pool. Once you're back from the DLC area? no one cares, no one knows, and no one will ever partake in that. Thus every DLC is a droolfest pit of clicking, and then going back and never playing it again, or seeing its effects again.

My worry is not discoverables or no discoverables. Easter eggs are great, and I probably took them for granted until this point (having already landed on one before refunding). Discoverables seem to be another name for easter eggs, or some remarkable hand-made feature planted in a procgen world. My worry is what about the entire rest of the planet sized map those discoverables are in? More discoverables? More barren procgen uninteresting wastelands? Is science only tied to discoverables or does the biome system make a comeback, or something better/worse? If the science gameplay revolves around discoverables, then we're all gonna be playing exactly the same game, and almost exactly the same route. Some time ago I realized my top games in my whole life were the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Series, Kenshi and Mount & Blade Warband. At first, it looks like a wild, disjointed selection, but in reality they're all games that share something very important in common: Emergent narrative elements in a world where the player is just another person, rather than the protagonist. Save for common story elements on the first series, every experience you will have is different, every goal you could craft is different, every way of achieving that goal is different as well. As it stands right now, the only thing that makes your experience of KSP1/2 different to mine (before mods) is how we design our rockets. Anything but that is the exact same for you and me, and the challenges we'll face will be the same: Land on the easy bodies, maybe try Moho and Eeloo, a Jool 5, make an SSTO, and an Eve ascent vehicle. Anything after that is roleplay. KSP2 is shaping to be the same, even if they include a grotesque amount of "discoverables", and there's one thing that makes the idea worse: They're selling it as an exploration game, even if what we'll end up exploring, seeing, and achieving is almost exactly the same. This is sadly the current state for most single-player experiences: A bottled in little story with few divergences, that requires you to not look at anyone else doing it, lest you spoil the experience for yourself, because it's literally gonna be the same for you. I honestly don't know what I expect, but I do want to see the narrative side taken further since they mentioned hiring writers.

Good thing this is not about cancer, good lord. The problem with appeal to authority is that they failed to present an argument and instead just bring an authoritarian figure that shares their viewpoint into the conversation. The pitfall of appeal to authority is precisely that not all authorities might agree, thus the discussion turns into a pokemon card match, to see who's got the biggest or most famous authority, instead of discussing the matter at hand. Even oncologists can have differing opinions.

I've seen them just so my missions had a point of getting there at all. Other than that, it's a repeatable experience we share in common, and when you think about the game having 3 star systems with many planets each, all of us going to the same places to see the same sights is kinda sad.

Oh no, don't take it as me questioning Chris' authority on the issue at hand. I wouldn't dare. I would dare, however, to point out that appealing to his authority as the ultimate decider is a fallacy, and I'm not even asking, but outright stating it. In regards to the system itself, sure, it doesn't need to go as deep as to be a good tool for actual spacecraft planners, we're all on the same side on that. KSP1 does have a steep learning curve, but there's noting to do once you're at the top, neither in the form of other learning curves, or anywhere to apply what you learned (bar roleplay, or mods).

How many hours did you wait for the discussion to develop just to add a basic appeal to authority type fallacy?

I think the point of the K.E.R.B is to tell us what you're working on rather than what you think is important. Have you been working 6 weeks on the same bug? the K.E.R.B. should reflect it. If an item is dropped from the list, it should be mentioned why (unless it shows up in patch notes, obviously). Otherwise what you end up doing is obscuring the process. You can easily see this reflected in the amount of questions on the K.E.R.B when the whole list changed and some of those bugs were indeed not fixed. This: Is the absolute opposite of what you should do.

What's there to talk about? Blackrack's immense work for sure, but other than that? Yeah, there's gonna be easter eggs, and mountains. The rover doesn't seem to have anything new on it, or anything you could look at and say "wow they added that to the game!?!?!" The whole concept of POIs doesn't really add much to the gameplay.

It demonstrates that every part will act as the magic DTCS in KSP2. There are no examples provided of parts that don't magically sap flux from anywhere in the vessel. I mean, for someone that completely overlooked how heat worked on the original, yeah, it's obvious to me you'd see it as minor. Instead of taking the good system from one, maybe making it better and actually having any mismanagement of it end up in proper consequences, they stripped it down to a mass tax and called it a day. There's still no source for the "significant impact". Having the whole vessel be a single total flux would kinda at least account for heat propagating and normalizing along the whole craft, as if it had internal cooling systems that move it around, even with the pitfall that it'd be instantaneous and magical. Now that you made me see that every part will be its own little heat thing in isolation, without conducting anywhere, yet with magical heatsinks that can be anywhere on the vessel, actually makes it worse.

Check the "complex" examples, the one below the 3 part ship orbiting kerbin specifically. The radiators deployed near the engine are used to cool the (i guess) reactor at the other side of the ship. I did ISRU a couple times until I learned to manage the heat and design good looking stuff, then like with literally everything else in the game I figured there's no point to it. One of my biggest gripes of KSP1 is that every gameplay "loop" is cut by simply asking "why". Why would I add ISRU to a Jool5 ship and bother with the extra designing and mass? for literally nothing other than saying I did. Sadly the rest of the game doesn't really require much heat management (again, blame SQUAD for being afraid of consequences), and KSP2 will make that even lesser it seems. ISRU, rockets with too many engines (like nukes), high speed atmospheric flying, flying near the Sun. Again, you can't blame the system for SQUAD not having made enough scenarios for it to be used. KSP2 will include those scenarios apparently but not the in depth system, which is really funny and sad. I don't get this, you want a situation where heat buildup would explode a part but it could be stopped by conducting to its neighbors? That's literally anything I mentioned above. If there wasn't an adjacent conduction between parts, those heat producing parts would just be isolated and build up heat till they explode. Again, the only ones that don't explode are ISRU and that's because they were programmed specifically to not explode. It's funny because every example he gave points to literally that: You have part with negative flux somewhere, it counteracts parts with positive flux anywhere else. Check the "complex" ship example, and the colony example: ^Radiator on the bottom cools reactor at the top even though (if piping is not assumed) the thermal mass of the truss in the middle would be negligible. ^Steam turbine looking thing and water piping cool down the whole base. As for what I would be happy with: An expanded rather than reduced heat system, with actual consequences and that required some thought be put into ship design. Hopefully well tied into life support. But hey, they're clearly making a cartoon instead of a proper sequel. This part is really funny, and also disingenuous for many reasons: That a hot thing makes things around it hot too is reality. If you think you "can't benefit from simulating that" then might as well not simulate anything, as you've thrown reality out the window. This is exactly what trivializes the whole heating system and reduces it to nothing more than soulless a mass tax. In KSP1 it reduces to equilibrium because it was safeguarded that way to not have parts explode on timewarp without warning. That safeguard is really dumb and trivializes the whole game. They need to simplify everything because they've build an overly bloated serialization system that needs to save every part of every vessel at every point of data they have. He talks about 50000 parts in 100 vessels when you can't even do that in the current game, let alone when heating and colonies arrive.

Lack of consequence is an issue that permeates every system, yet funnily enough heat does build up under timewarp for isru parts. Now tell me, how has the perma-timewarp problem been addressed for KSP2? oh wait.

Actually, being individual parts that can't conduct to each other yet somehow can have their heat dissipated by select others is worse. That a hot thing will heat others around it is basic reality. Definitely, but it didn't make it any better. Even if that's true on re-entry, it's not true anywhere else. A part having lots of neighbors means its heat can dissipate before it's a problem, even if to other parts. Contrary to KSP2, where every radiator is a magic radiator and parts don't conduct to neighbors. It's also an abstraction of conductivity not being 100% efficient, thus a part could soak up flux, as its skin remained hot, and then after the skin cools, it'd slowly conduct to neighbors or the environment. Yes, it can be abstracted to a single value, so long as you include the efficiency factor for conductivity, which'd make no sense if all your radiators can magically conduct to themselves. Literally anything ISRU. Converters and drills were the biggest heat generators in the game. Of course they wouldn't explode parts, as they'd shut themselves down first with bad conductivity. Again, blame SQUAD for not wanting to include proper consequences for bad stuff. However, to see the effect at hand, you could make a craft that has drills and converters at the bottom, and static radiators at the top. You could then try putting the radiators closer to the drills and converters and see the difference as the heat transfer becomes more efficient and those parts are able to operate for longer. Well, in the case of ISRU or NERVas you can't attach them directly, adding a bit of nuance to how you have to manage that, and giving a chance for the system to show its workings and consequences. In KSP2 it literally doesn't matter: radiators can suck heat from any part anywhere in the vessel, so where your heat generators and your radiators are has 0 influence on how you make your ship. Also KSP1 would simulate heat (and ISRU) for off focus vessels, in a basic way. In fact there was a bug at some point where your whole base would save up heat and instantly explode when focused. You also keep mentioning CPU impact, but I haven't seen any metric of it, so I'd appreciate a source. The last thing I remember is the heat overlay bug, but that was graphical. These days, not at all. Also, anonymous readers don't matter at all, given that the people we can gather an opinion from are not the anonymous readers, and them reading the forum doesn't mean they agree with anyone in particular. In fact, I'd bet most anonymous are here for mods. Also, the reddit doesn't exist in a vacuum. The "cesspool" of hate pictured on Reddit is the same on Steam, on their twits, the youtube comments and so on. Only FS! announcement has changed that a bit, and a lot of that change is also by people giving up and going away instead of staying for 8 months to support or criticize.

My bad. I'd agree with this on principle, I didn't really expect to be discussing something like the heat system, but I expect a sequel to go deeper rather than simpler. Then you're missing how important part to part conduction is. I hope you realize the problem by looking at the 3 part spacecraft in orbit example, and the one right below them: A part can explode by itself without affecting anything else. A part can cool another on the other side of the craft even though there's no part to part conduction, and thus that hot part doesn't affect its neighbors. As a bit of a secondary consequence of the downgrade, not having a Skin/Core system also means heat can instantly be dissipated to the environment for free. Now think of how that lack of dynamics compares to KSP1, where a heat part might not only take itself out but its neighbor/s, and where you place heat generators vs dissipators influences the design (bar usage of the one magic part). The one reason this kind of stuff isn't headlights-to-the-eyes evident is because SQUAD was really afraid to put consequences for anything in the game. Normally, having a Kerbal EVA right after you re-entered a capsule means the little guy should melt. Having a nuke producing heat should degrade the quality of life in the cockpit as coolant is sent there unless you had extra. Living in a hellhole where you can't touch the walls should mean the science or resources produced should have a drop in quality or amount. Mounting 17 engines to a single plate should mean a piping hell that kills your performance with excessive mass. Flying your SSTO inside a fireball should vaporize the kerbals inside before the structure (or worse). But god forbid the game actually has any semblance of difficulty, and now in KSP2 any semblance of depth.

And you think those assumptions (some of which aren't assumptions) are not grounded on reality. They are. KSP2 removes the Skin/Core system, and doesnt remove "part to part convection", it removes the whole part dynamic from the equation, and you're failing or refusing to see how that affects the whole dynamic. The whole vessel receives and radiates heat as a single part, that wasn't the case in one, as every part would generate and dissipate heat at different rates. Even if the DTCS in KSP1 does abstract a plumbing system to draw heat from all parts, it doesn't outright delete heat like it would in KSP2. This means in KSP2: Craft design doesn't matter. Any dissipating part will be equally effective anywhere. Since part to part convection is not a thing, that means craft design just got not only stupid easy but outright unimportant. In KSP1, mounting all your heat generators to a single part would easily make that part overheat, so even with the DTCS there was some nuance to craft design where not all your drills or converters could be attached to a single part, unless you outright spammed the one part that trivialized the whole system. Not using the DTCS also meant there was a whole new world to craft design, as heat wasn't magically sucked from all parts. This also gave you the chance to create realistic structures where a heat generating part is built away from the main craft, and piped through a multiple part system (specially with docking and thanks to part to part convection) so the heat would dissipate into a number of parts instead of magically heating up a cockpit on the other side of the craft. For bases on hostile planets (with mods, as god forbid they actually make the game challenging), isolating your base from the ground was a proper challenge, contrary to any leg of your base conducting heat into the whole of it. The Skin/Core system also meant parts could build up and keep heat without dissipating it effectively, as cooling the surface wasn't directly translated to cooling the core. In KSP1, I could NOT use DTCS and thus have to play with the heat system in a different way, in KSP2 there's no playing with the heat system, only attaching magic parts anywhere and be done with it. It's literally just a part tax that doesn't even influence design. Just to be clear, I'm not saying the system in KSP1 was perfect or even good. My point is entirely based on the new system being a clear downgrade. There's less simulation at play, so there's less stuff that will happen, and there's diminished point to the whole system as it is trivialized by magic heat dissipating parts that don't care about spacecraft design. This was mentioned multiple times to Nertea (and I'm sure explained better than me) on his devblog.

Nah, you just can't find a sample that agrees with your view and thus are ready to think everyone else is just a groupthink. Again, the subreddit has 1.5 million followers. If you wanna assume they're a hivemind and not viable as a sample because reasons when they represent almost 30% of the entire market share this game has the hope of achieving, then there's nothing to talk about, you're not interested in representativeness, just pushing a point that's completely not based on reality. It's an option, you're not forced to skip the entire system. Meanwhile KSP2 skips the whole system for you.

The functionality is there and a part including an abstraction for plumbing simulation and others not is actually more depth. For the entire playerbase of KSP2 (people that have actually bought it, so around ~300k), you need a sample size of ~15k for 99% confidence in your results. Who do you think would be closer as representative? The 50 people in the forum bashing the first game to have a reason to defend the second, the thousand active on reddit on peak hours, or the tens of thousands active on Steam? So yeah, the majority is not playing the game. The majority is also not on these forums, they're on those other two places. Your "don't know" argument is poorly thought out and doesn't reflect any sort of reality of how polling a group works.

The heat needs to convect part to part to reach radiators, which diminishes cooling efficiency the further the cooling part is from the heat generating part. Placement did matter. The subreddit has 1.5 million followers, and it was a massively active place before KSP2 dropped as well. Even then, it's got a magnitude more active people than here, thus, less deviation from what can be considered a general opinion about the game. This is also true for the Steam Hub for both games, which is probably the most active place where the game is discussed, and has like 250k followers for the base game and about 180k for the sequel. If you don't want to get out of the forum, that's fine, but that'll never change the reality that the 1.5 million in the subreddit and the almost 500k between both hubs are more representative than the 20 to 50 users that keep posting in this forum. I mean, that's gotta be the biggest part and I agree with that statement, but again, you'd know how big the demand for knowing what happened between the first release date for a full game in 2020 and the EA release in 2023 is if you dared to get out of this echo chamber. It's almost ubiquitous to any discussion of the game (even here if you want to only take the forum into account). We lost functionality. Where you place radiators has no relevance anymore, separating parts with more than a single joint doesn't matter anymore, separating heat emitting parts from each other and not having them all linked to a single part doesn't matter anymore. The system has been downgraded, and thus the experience around it has been degraded, as it's been relegated to a simple "look at number and include part with bigger number". I guess it really is the latest form of copium to just bash the first game without really haven't paid attention to how it works. Well, not for me. I have no plan to pay $50 if all systems are gonna be either carbon copies, or downgrades, and if new systems are also reduced to simple implementations. That'd be a failure to justify the pricetag.

In principle what you say sounds right, but doesn't really fit 80% of the first game's playerbase not purchasing the sequel almost a year later, and the people that have still keeping it in mostly negative reviews. As I told another user before, get out of the forums, we're like 20 people posting in these threads, what we say and think here is not indicative of absolutely anything that may be reflected in the 30000 people that played the game at peak, or the rest of the 5 million that bought the first and aren't buying the second yet. Not for me. Simplification is the opposite of simulation. Mining, where radiators could be too far from heat generating parts, causing heat to build up, is the first thing that comes to mind. Also funnily enough, building in extreme environments would work more realistically in KSP1, with skin vs core temperature interactions and part to part convection versus "lol you're touching water here's instant negative flux to your whole base" that the new system proposes. More importantly, where you'd place radiators matters so heat management becomes more of a challenge than the droolfest of looking at heat number and add the right amount of parts wherever to counteract. Systems they're charging me AAA price for, versus free mods.